Monday, April 21, 2008

Mars Here On Earth

As I have mentioned before, we cartoonists and animators easily fall into creative cliches and artistic ruts, by drawing the same things the same ways over and over again for years. (We are encouraged to do that by non-creative management and a broken production system, so it's not completely our fault, but we also are slaves to trends unless we will ourselves to go against all that is conservative and holy.

We get stuck drawing the same stock expressions, poses and character designs and don't even realize it.

This applies also to background artists. You can see the same stock trees, plants, houses in tons of cartoons. Trees are always the same brown, sky is always the same blue, foliage and grass is always the same green.

The only way to break out of this pattern of animation sameness, is to observe the world. Take a trip to Mars if you can afford it.We went to the Huntington Library last year and took a bunch of pictures of their desert exhibit. You can't believe how weird and varied the life forms of just one environment are!The way they have landscaped it is like a tour of evolution. You can see certain types of forms in each area and then a million variations of the forms. Like these cacti that are flattened star forms stacked on top of each other.Here's a Martian star cacti with pubic hair.

If you are a painter, you can get a ton of color ideas and break out of the primary, secondary pouring colors straight out of the tubes cartoon palette.

If you don't want to draw stock flat cheat designs anymore, you can study the hierarchy of forms in infinite varieties. (I'll do a post about this soon)Textures also come in a thrilling variety.

How many times do you draw the exact same bark texture on your trees? Go out and look at how many different really interesting kinds of bark there are. (In Canada all cartoon background objects , not just trees, have the exact same surface texture, trees, houses, dirt, mountains are all covered with the same Sheridan College Layout Class surface itch.)

Buahahaha that last one gave me the chills! I love this post, such a good topic to raise. I remember when i was drawing my layouts for my first 2D work the first thing i did was the A-typical bark, grass and sky. I think in a way its become symbolic/stereotypical of just what those objects are. I totally agree with you though and i like your reference to mars because when we draw outside of the 'norm' it tends to bring an outer worldly quality to it doesn't it?

That's so weird - as soon as I saw that first photo I thought "That must be the Huntington Library." As a kid, we used to hop the fence and go running around in there late at night amongst all the weird plants - usually with a last stop in the Japanese garden to ring the gong and haul ass before the security guards showed up. They're opening up a Chinese garden soon (might already be open) which should offer up even more amazing plants.

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You know what else is a great inspiration is insects and marine life, especially marine life. Anything that's alien, weird, or doesn't quite register with human brains is good for wacky, surreal realms and crazy colors.

I think botany and zoology are incredible references for cartoons. There are so many things in those fields that we look past or rarely see that have amazing qualities to them. Also, that Popeye looks horrendous. What's with the pig nose?

"Please show some examples of this "Sheridan College Layout Class surface itch," in the near future. Because I don't really know what you're talking about."

I also haven't got a clue what he's talking about. I watch Canadian animation a lot, and most of it is flat flat FLAT. No textures. They're often lucky if they even have SHADOWS these days. They all use this program, I forget it's name, but it does most of the animation for them. It even gets the characters to lipsynch for them. And even though it's all animated in a "3D" space, the animators are so bad with the program, it's even flatter than actual 2D animation! Canadian animation has gone to shit since the glory days of Ryan Larkin. I think our animators fell harder and faster than yours. The fall of American animation was long and drawn out. In Canada, animation just suddenly sucked without warning.

Hey, John, are you maybe referring to something like The Raccoons? (Believe it or not, that was a hit song in Canada).Yeah, things could be better in the Canadian animation industry that's for sure. One friend of mine told me about his dealing with a producer on a project in Saskatoon. The guy demanded to know why the grass was painted a nice bright green. He and others spent I don't now how many hours trying to explain to him that "well, it's a night time scene. At night time, everything is a darker colour." But, he still couldn't understand what they were saying and kept insisting that the grass be repainted a brighter green.

I understand what you're saying. I know i sounded pissed, but i appreciate what youre doing for the animation community.

and yes i do notice the increasing bland nature of animation.

I'll be perfectly honest, you're a huge inspiration to myself and a lot of us here at sheridan. Frankly, i found it offensive that you singled us out as a cause of the problem towards the blandness of animation. We're not totally wide eyed, naieve, and stupid, trust me, we see the problems in the industry too. and yeah sure, we're just students at this point, but theres a chunk of us who genuinely care about animation as an art form and would like to improve whats been done to it.

and yeah, you do have a point. Having been at sheridan for 3 years now. Ever since they tried to make animation a Bachlor program, it's gone to hell. Thankfully we know the value of resources like your blog. Not all of us, but a lot of us strive to improve on our skills every day.

as I'm sure you and a lot of your readers know. animation isnt just a simple career path. For those who really take it seriously, it's a life style.

So I'm sorry If i got all defensive there. but I'm passionate about it and I know some incredible artists that are students here at sheridan that will go on to do great things in the animation world.

i urge you to look at some of our blogs in your free time John.

haha and don't forget John. at one point you were a sheridan student as well.